Novel Quotes
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There is no 'right' way to begin a novel, but for me, plot has to wait. The character comes first.
Susan Isaacs
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You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year
Ray Bradbury
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What a joy it is to read a book that shocks one into remembering just how high one's literary standards should be.... a tour de force by one of England's best novelists.... Atonement is a spectacular book; as good a novel - and more satisfying... - than anything McEwan has written....sublimely written narrative.... The Dunkirk passage is a stupendous piece of writing, a set piece that could easily stand on its own.
Noah Richler
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The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.
Eudora Welty
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At the emergence of the modern novel with Rabelais and Cervantes, all kinds of things were possible in a long-form prose work. Within a couple of hundred years, most of those possibilities were abandoned in favor of a text that efficiently transmitted sentiments.
Teju Cole
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I don’t want what we’re doing to just end up as notes for a novel.
Ben Lerner
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The only thing which can tell us about the novel is the novel.
Edwin Muir
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The historical background is one of the easier aspects of writing a novel. Far more difficult is dreaming up the smaller, character-based scenes, scenes that rise entirely from one's own imagination.
Ethan Canin
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I don't talk about my books while I'm writing them: not even my husband knows what a novel's about until it's done.
Sarah Dessen
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I write all of my novels and stories, as you have seen, in a great surge of delightful passion. Only recently, glancing at the novel, I realized that Montag is named after a paper manufacturing company. And Faber, of course, is a maker of pencils! What a sly thing my subconscious was, to name them thus. And not tell me!
Ray Bradbury
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If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
Terry Eagleton
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Don’t try to write a novel. Write short stories and then figure out how to connect them.
Ray Bradbury
